Rodolfo Hernández, the businessman who showed that in Colombia there is room for a Trump or a Milei

“Congratulations to Javier Milei for his victory in Argentina! Milei is a brave and honest guy who is not afraid to tell the truth. His victory is a sign that the people of our region are tired of corruption and inequality. Now it is time to work hard, to put the chainsaw to work on bureaucracy and politicking,” wrote Rodolfo Hernández, the businessman turned politician who was on the verge of becoming president of Colombia, in November 2023, and who died this Monday. In an institutionalist and legalist country, in which all recent presidents have been elected as political insiders, a congratulation to the far-right libertarian, beyond the protocolary greetings, was unusual. Former President Álvaro Uribe, the most significant leader of the Colombian right in the last quarter century, was much more sparing. “Congratulations President Milei, may you succeed for the good of Argentina and all our countries,” he said then.

This contrast highlights the significance that the former mayor of Bucaramanga had for Colombian politics. While its neighbors have had presidents who came from outside the political system — Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Ollanta Humala or Alberto Fujimori in Peru, Abdalá Bucaram or Rafael Correa in Ecuador — this has not happened in Colombia. The election of Gustavo Petro in 2022, just after defeating Hernández, was a historic opening in a country that had not elected a leftist president in decades, but it was not a outsider comparable in politics. Former mayor of Bogotá, twice elected representative to the House, twice to the Senate and presidential candidate in 2010 and 2018, Petro was a well-known and respected figure in politics.

Hernández, no. A civil engineer by profession, for four decades he worked in construction in his native Santander. Piedecuesta, where he was born 79 years ago, and the neighbouring Floridablanca and Bucaramanga – the departmental capital – bear today the imprint of the houses and buildings he built. Along the way, he became rich and became friends with a good part of the local political class, an area with strong liberal roots, and was even briefly a councillor in Piedecuesta for that party at the end of the seventies. He financed campaigns, helped congressmen, and became part of a certain local elite.

It was only at the age of 70, when many have already managed to retire or hope to retire, that he decided to start a new life, now as a candidate for Mayor of the capital of Santander. Having entered the electoral life at that point was the first contribution to his image as an outsider, a disruptive figure in the last great Colombian city dominated by traditional politicians. His campaign confirmed that image. His brother Gabriel, an engineer turned philosopher, was the ideologist of a movement they called Logic, Ethics and Aesthetics. The engineer, as he was known since then, raised some typical flags of anti-politics and a certain populism: pointing out others as corrupt, promising to bring processes more appropriate to the private sector to the local State, using social media broadcasts to communicate directly with citizens, giving his salary to less fortunate people. The wealth accumulated over the years gave Hernández a level of economic independence that few Colombian politicians can have, one more difference to reinforce his differences with the usual candidates.

The engineer achieved significant changes in the city, especially in the administrative area, and helped break some of the clientelist networks that are common in much of Colombian local politics. Characterized by his spontaneity and loquacity, the outbursts that his critics called sexist, rude or simply abusive did not make a dent in his image. On the contrary, an episode of violence and intolerance made him known outside the department. At the beginning of 2018, he invited opposition councilor John Claro to his Facebook Live program, and ended up slapping him in front of the dozens or hundreds of citizens connected, who quickly became tens of thousands due to the viralization of the video. “You lie, son of a bitch,” the president is heard saying, after eight minutes of an increasingly heated conversation in which accusations are exchanged. In a country where polls show people distrust the political class, where violence has been seen as a way to resolve differences, many saw Hernandez’s attitude as a sign of independence. Although it earned him a suspension from office, Rodolfo forged ahead.

Nor did the growing scandal known as Vitalogic, involving a company interested in winning the bid for the city’s garbage disposal, hurt him. Little by little, an irregularity was revealed: one of his sons was a lobbyist for the company and had signed and notarized a contract that guaranteed him a juicy commission of $666,000 if the company won the contract. The mayor denied knowing about this business of a wayward son, and remained in office. He only left by his own decision, after the Attorney General’s Office admonished him for campaigning in favor of his successor, Juan Carlos Cárdenas. The decision was simple: resign so that nothing would prevent him from helping to elect his appointee, as finally happened. Hernández left the Mayor’s Office with a popularity of 85%, Cárdenas won with 48% of the votes and no other candidate came close to 14%.

That trajectory was fundamental for what was to come, what seemed to be only Hernández’s second electoral campaign, but it was his last. He did it without a political party — he had distanced himself from Cárdenas and had not built a structure for a campaign — and with little external support. He used his spontaneity and took advantage of the surprise factor of the candidate that no one sees coming. With Argentine advisers, he built a strategy based on appearances on social networks that mixed criticism of “the corrupt” and a good-natured image, of WhatsApp groups that grew organically, of avoiding the stale and boring debates of traditional politicians. He started by fighting the margin of error with the polls to become the second vote in the first round, dragging the votes of almost six million Colombians along with him. He crushed the official candidate of the right, the current mayor of Medellín, Federico Gutiérrez, in all the regions that have tended to the right in the last decade, except in Antioquia. He became a phenomenon that cornered Petro, with whom he competed for the position of being anti-system. He was, but in a different way, one that did not question the economic system but the political class.

The extravagance then reached the extreme: he said he had known of a plan to assassinate him “not with lead, but with a knife” and went to Miami. Despite this, he added another 4.5 million votes and lost by a narrow 3%. With the right to a seat in the Senate, which the Constitution provides for the head of the opposition, Hernández chose to meet with the man who had beaten him and publish a photo of the two of them, hugging, on social media. In addition, he resigned from Congress after just a month and a half. “It’s like having Lionel Messi as a goalkeeper,” he argued. It was the beginning of his decline, which included his dispute with his vice-presidential running mate, the conviction in the first instance for corruption in the Vitalogic case – which he appealed – and the cancer that led him to the grave.

He did not leave behind a political structure, an ideological legacy, or a vision for the country. He did, however, embody the rejection of millions of Colombians to a political system that is still in force, in different ways, both in the opposition and in Petro’s government, to a system in which he himself participated and which shows a deterioration like that which brought Chávez, Milei, or Trump to power.

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